A small confession

I have a little confession to make... I've fallen off the practice bandwagon -*shock*. I know it happens; I’m not flaying myself with a birch branch about it and I know our practice ebbs and flows, that’s just how it is. However, I have noticed how it’s affected my life in some very specific and clear ways:
 

Goodbye energy:  I can’t focus, I’m down, my get up and go has got up and gone

Goodbye awareness: Conscious eating is out of the window, think before I speak? – not so much, getting gnarly about the small stuff is on the rise
 

Goodbye fun: there’s a heaviness to everything, a desire to sit under my mat not on it, I haven’t phoned a friend in a while

Interesting isn’t it. The thing about yoga practice is that when you start it’s like a hit that lights you up for days afterwards. Then after you get accustomed to feeling happy and bright most of the time it’s a huge imposition to not get that feeling. Then you get a bit complacent about it and think, it’s cool, I’ll get back to that in time. Then all of a sudden your mats in a corner gathering dust.

‘nough said. Less blogging more mat time.

Purifying pulsation

I’ve been feeling under the weather for the last couple of weeks, it’s ok, it’s just a cold, I’ll live! What I found interesting is that we have this expression “under the weather”, as if we equate our inner experience to the outer by way of communicating this message. It reminds me of one of the Upanishads, one of the seminal works of yoga philosophy: what's inside is outside and what's outside is inside. Essentially, we carry a microcosm of the universe within our bodies.

I love to think of myself in this way, to draw the parallels between myself and nature. To understand that there are constant cycles, pulsation, what the Tantrikas call Spanda. Day follows night, summer follows spring. These things are all so familiar to us and returning to them time and again regrounds use into our essential nature, the earth. It’s only with a solid foundation that you can build a house, the same goes for our bodies.

When we honour these cycles, when I rest, do restorative or pranayama (breathing exercises) because I’m sick or tired, I find I’m much more able to expand out from a place of solid foundation. It feels really good J